Chapter three
In the hills around Zaragoza, Orwell experiences the “mingled boredom and discomfort of stationary warfare,” the mundaneness of a situation in which “each army had dug itself in and settled down on the hill-tops it had won.” He praises the Spanish militias for their relative social equality, for their holding of the front while the army was trained in the rear, and for the “democratic ‘revolutionary’ type of discipline … more reliable than might be expected.” “‘Revolutionary’ discipline depends on political consciousness—on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square”.
Throughout the chapter Orwell describes the various shortages and problems at the front—firewood (“We were between two and three thousand feet above sea-level, it was mid winter and the cold was unspeakable”), food, candles, tobacco, and adequate munitions—as well as the danger of accidents inherent in a badly trained and poorly armed group of soldiers.
Chapter four
After some three weeks at the front, Orwell and the other English militiaman in his unit, Williams, join a contingent of fellow Englishmen sent out by the Independent Labour Party to a position at Monte Oscuro, within sight of Zaragoza. “Perhaps the best of the bunch was Bob Smillie—the grandson of the famous miners’ leader—who afterwards died such an evil and meaningless death in Valencia”.
In this new position he witnesses the sometimes propagandistic shouting between the Rebel and Loyalist trenches and hears of the fall of Málaga. “… every man in the militia believed that the loss of Malaga was due to treachery. It was the first talk I had heard of treachery or divided aims. It set up in my mind the first vague doubts about this war in which, hitherto, the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple.”
In February, he is sent with the other POUM militiamen 50 miles to make a part of the army besieging Huesca; he mentions the running joke phrase, “Tomorrow we’ll have coffee in Huesca,” attributed to a general commanding the Government troops who, months earlier, made one of many failed assaults on the town.
Chapter five (orig. ch. 6)
Orwell complains that on the eastern side of Huesca, where he was stationed, nothing ever seemed to happen—except the onslaught of spring, and, with it, lice. He was in a (“so-called”) hospital at Monflorite for ten days at the end of March 1937 with a poisoned hand that had to be lanced and put in a sling. He describes rats that “really were as big as cats, or nearly” (in Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the protagonist Winston Smith has a phobia of rats that Orwell himself shared to a lesser degree).
He makes reference to the lack of “religious feeling, in the orthodox sense,” and that the Catholic Church was, “to the Spanish people, at any rate in Catalonia and Aragon, a racket, pure and simple. And possibly Christian belief was replaced to some extent by Anarchism”. The latter portion of the chapter briefly details various operations in which Orwell took part: silently advancing the Loyalist frontline by night, for example.
Chapter six (orig. ch. 7)
Orwell takes part in a “holding attack” on Huesca, designed to draw the Nationalist troops away from an Anarchist attack on “the Jaca road.” He suspects two of the bombs he threw may have killed their targets, but he cannot be sure. They capture the position and pull back with captured rifles and ammunition, but Orwell laments that they fled too hurriedly to bring back a telescope they had discovered, which Orwell sees as more useful than any weapons.
Chapter seven (orig. ch. 8)
Orwell shares memories of the 115 days he spent on the war front, and its influence on his political ideas, “… the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism … the ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England … the effect was to make my desire to see Socialism established much more actual than it had been before.” By the time he left Spain, he had become a “convinced democratic Socialist.” The chapter ends with Orwell’s arrival in Barcelona on the afternoon of 26 April 1937. “And after that the trouble began.”
Chapter eight (orig. ch. 9)
Orwell details noteworthy changes in the social and political atmosphere of Barcelona when he returns after three months at the front. He describes a lack of revolutionary atmosphere and the class division that he had thought would not reappear, i.e., with visible division between rich and poor and the return of servile language.
Orwell had been determined to leave the POUM, and confesses here that he “would have liked to join the Anarchists,” but instead sought a recommendation to join the International Column, so that he could go to the Madrid front.
The latter half of this chapter is devoted to describing the conflict between the anarchist CNT and the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) and the resulting cancellation of the May Day demonstration and the build-up to the street fighting of the “Barcelona May Days”. “It was the antagonism between those who wished the revolution to go forward and those who wished to check or prevent it—ultimately, between Anarchists and Communists.”
Chapter nine (orig. ch. 10)
Orwell relates his involvement in the “May Days”‘ Barcelona street fighting that began on 3 May when the Government Assault Guards tried to take the Telephone Exchange from the CNT workers who controlled it. For his part, Orwell acted as part of the POUM, guarding a POUM-controlled building.
Although he realises that he is fighting on the side of the working class, Orwell describes his dismay at coming back to Barcelona on leave from the front only to get mixed up in street fighting. Assault Guards from Valencia arrive—”All of them were armed with brand-new rifles … vastly better than the dreadful old blunderbusses we had at the front.”
The Communist-controlled Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia newspapers declare POUM to be a disguised Fascist organisation—”No one who was in Barcelona then, or for months later, will forget the horrible atmosphere produced by fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food queues, and prowling gangs of armed men.” In his second appendix to the book, Orwell discusses the political issues at stake in the May 1937 Barcelona fighting, as he saw them at the time and later on, looking back.
Chapter ten (orig. ch. 12)
Orwell speculates on how the Spanish Civil War might turn out. Orwell predicts that the “tendency of the post-war Government … is bound to be Fascistic.”
He returns to the front, where he is shot through the throat by a sniper, an injury that takes him out of the war. After spending some time in a hospital in Lleida, he was moved to Tarragona where his wound was finally examined more than a week after he’d left the front.
Chapter eleven (orig. ch. 13)
Orwell tells us of his various movements between hospitals in Siétamo, Barbastro, and Monzón while getting his discharge papers stamped, after being declared medically unfit. He returns to Barcelona only to find out from his wife that the POUM had been “suppressed”: it had been declared illegal the very day he had left to obtain discharge papers and POUM members were being arrested without charge. “The attack on Huesca was beginning … there must have been numbers of men who were killed without ever learning that the newspapers in the rear were calling them Fascists. This kind of thing is a little difficult to forgive.” While his wife went back to the hotel, he sleeps that night in the ruins of a church; he cannot go back to his hotel because of the danger of arrest.
Chapter twelve (orig. ch. 14)
This chapter describes his visits accompanied by his wife to Georges Kopp, unit commander of the ILP Contingent while Kopp was held in a Spanish makeshift jail—”really the ground floor of a shop.” Having done all he could to free Kopp, ineffectively and at great personal risk, Orwell decides to leave Spain. Crossing the Pyrenees frontier, he and his wife arrived in France “without incident”.
Appendix one (orig. ch. 5)
Orwell explains the divisions within the Republican side: “On the one side the CNT-FAI, the POUM, and a section of the Socialists, standing for workers’ control: on the other side the Right-wing Socialists, Liberals, and Communists, standing for centralized government and a militarized army.” He also writes: “One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right.”
Appendix two (orig. ch. 11)
An attempt to dispel some of the myths in the foreign press at the time (mostly the pro-Communist press) about the “May Days”, the street fighting that took place in revolutionary Catalonia in early May 1937.
This was between anarchists and POUM members, against Communist/government forces which sparked off when local police forces occupied the Telephone Exchange, which had until then been under the control of CNT workers.
He relates the suppression of the POUM on 15–16 June 1937, gives examples of the Communist Press of the world—(Daily Worker, 21 June, “Spanish Trotskyists Plot With Franco”), indicates that Indalecio Prieto hinted, “fairly broadly to the delegation that the government could not afford to offend the Communist Party while the Russians were supplying arms.” He quotes Julián Zugazagoitia, the Minister of the Interior; “We have received aid from Russia and have had to permit certain actions which we did not like.”
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